


One Beating Heart

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Series: Uncertain Point of View [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkward Romance, F/M, Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Happy Ending, Holy smokes writing romance is hard, POV Mara Jade, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-24 08:31:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16171418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: Your name is Mara Jade and once upon a time you were the Emperor’s secret agent.You fulfilled your master’s final order and killed Luke Skywalker.Now Luke won’t leave you alone.





	One Beating Heart

Your name is Mara Jade.

You used to be the Emperor's Hand: his agent, his tool, the one who worked from the shadows.

You were connected to him through the Force which means that you felt him die.

You heard his dying command: _You will kill Luke Skywalker._

So you did. You found Luke Skywalker and killed him, fulfilling your master's final order.

Only now, Luke won't leave you alone.

* * *

The first time you see him, he is a vision in your head from the Emperor’s last moments.

The second time you see him, you stick a vibroblade into his chest. Jedi are hard to kill, you’ve heard, so you sit nearby and watch him die. It’s strangely intimate, even though you’ve watched people die before. You fight the urge to hold his hand as the life fades from Luke’s pale eyes and the Emperor’s compulsion fades from your mind. Afterwards, you don’t feel regret but you do feel a little sad. He didn’t seem terrible.

The third time you see him, you nearly damage your ship because you instinctively pull out your blaster and fire it at him. The shot passes right through him, which you should have expected because he doesn’t look solid, he looks like some kind of hologram, glowing blue and transparent in the co-pilot’s seat. Fortunately, the bolt only hits the seat itself and burns a neat hole into the fabric.

There is no good way to start this conversation because there are too many obvious yet impossible things to acknowledge first. “What are you doing here?” is the best you can manage.

You don’t expect his response to be a look of embarrassment and an admission that he doesn’t actually know why he’s here.

He died. He’s dead. He knows that much. He remembers you killing him. Obviously there’s a connection, it’s just that neither of you know what that means. He merely shrugs and says that it probably has something to do with the Force.

He is surprisingly nice about the fact that he’s dead because of you, to the point that you almost feel like you should apologize. You don’t apologize, though.

You tell him to leave. He sits there for a few minutes and finally says that he doesn’t know how. This isn’t something he understands either.

You tell him to at least get the hell out of your cockpit. He complies without saying anything. When you finally go to the back of the ship, hoping that you imagined the whole thing, he isn’t there.

* * *

The fourth time you see him, he appears almost directly in front of you, his face only a few inches from your own. The only satisfying thing about that is watching him leap backwards, just as startled as you are. You weren’t aware that ghosts could blush.

You demand to know what he wants, what could be so important that he had to show up on your ship again. He spends a moment thinking about it, then says shyly that he never actually knew your name, so maybe you could start with that?

You only tell him the basics. You’re not here to give him your life story, even though he seems weirdly interested in hearing it.

By the seventh time you see him, you’ve answered more of his questions and have started asking some of your own.

* * *

Your encounters become routine. You spend most of your time with him on your ship, which isn't surprising since you don't really live anywhere else while you travel from planet to planet looking for ways to waste time. Sometimes he'll follow you when you wander around a spaceport, but mostly you sit together in the cockpit, you in the pilot’s seat and him in the co-pilot’s, and watch the stars shift into hyperspace and back again.

You’re not really the best company most of the time. You’re directionless for the first time in your life and if you slip up you’re going to be captured or worse. You used to have Palpatine’s missions and his protection, but now you don’t. You never had friends and you’re not sure what to do about this young man who seems hellbent on befriending you even though he’s the last person who should.

You grumble that the afterlife must be more boring than you thought if he prefers to spend his time around you rather than doing literally _anything_ else. He just smiles and goes back to looking out at the starlines of hyperspace.

At one point, he quietly thanks you for not leaving him alone when he died. You try to joke that you were just being thorough, but then you look him in the eyes and realize how deeply he means it. A pain begins to grow in your chest: one so sharp and deadly that you wonder briefly if you’ve been stabbed as well.

It isn’t a physical pain. It’s something much worse.

* * *

You're so preoccupied with your own issues that it takes until the twenty-fourth time that you see him to ask him where he goes when he isn't here with you.

He says that he doesn't know. You're skeptical: how can he not know? Does that mean that he just jumps from the moment he leaves you straight to the moment that he returns? He doesn't seem too concerned about it but you start to wonder what that must be like.

The more you wonder, the more you realize that the only reason why he hasn't just vanished entirely is because of you. You don't know whether you're his last chance to escape oblivion or if you're just forcing him to be here when he could have moved on instead. You're afraid to ask him which is correct.

You stopped asking him to leave a long time ago but you've never asked him _not_ to leave. You don't know if it's possible, you don't know if he'd say yes and, more importantly, you don't know how to ask.

After the twenty-fifth time, you realize that there are only two ways that this can end: either he leaves for good or he haunts you for the rest of your life. You tell yourself that you can’t decide which one would be worse. You worry that you already know the answer.

* * *

You take odd jobs sometimes to get enough credits for fuel and supplies. The twenty-eighth time you see him, Luke notes that it’s like you’re waiting for something to happen, like you’re treading water until then. You roll your eyes and point out that he grew up on a desert planet and has probably never had to tread water in his entire life. Then you remember that he’s dead.

There are a few times when the jobs you take go awry, when you have to run for your life and often fight for it while you’re running. The thirty-first time you see Luke, you shoot a glitbiting thug; when you finally get back to the ship, you joke that you hope that the thug doesn’t end up haunting you too. There is a very awkward silence, during which you can feel an apology on the back of your teeth, but then he starts laughing and the two of you giggle for far longer than is appropriate.

After that, there are times that he pretends to get exasperated with you and complains “you’re killing me, Mara!” and it gets funnier every time.

During what you originally assumed was the thirty-eighth time but turned out to be the thirty-seventh time because he was still there while you were asleep, you open your eyes to the sight of him pleading with you to wake up. You left your ship docked and secured, but now there’s a gang of nasty-looking Weequay trying to force their way in. You mutter a curse because you should have known better than to stick around here after loading up your cargo, even if you had a few hours before delivery.

You figure that you’ll have better odds in the air, so you kick in your ship’s repulsorlift coils before you grab your blaster and head to the cargo hold.

You’re halfway there when you realize that your strategy wasn’t ideal and Luke’s appearance at your side confirms it: now cut loose from its spot, your ship is drifting outside the range of the energy shield that keeps the docking bay protected from the vacuum of space. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, but the Weequay apparently brought a plasma cutter with them.

You reach the hold and see the ugly molten line of a cut through your ship’s hull when a whole section of it explodes outward, sending both your cargo and its attempted thieves tumbling out.

Your ship has safeguards in place in the event of cabin depressurization, but it takes just long enough to go into effect that you’re still at risk of being dragged out yourself. You reach desperately for something to grab onto as the contents of your cargo hold are vented into space, but there’s nothing that you can reach and a voice in the back of your mind points out with an unnerving calm that you’re about to die—

A hand grabs you by the wrist.

Those extra seconds were all you needed: the shields come up, the ship repressurizes, and you collapse to the deck. The ventilation systems are working hard to circulate air back into the cabin but for the moment you’re oxygen-deprived enough that you start to black out.

Before the darkness fills your vision, you see Luke kneeling next to you, his eyes wide with worry. You can’t think clearly enough to say anything, so you just squeeze his hand and hope that he gets the message.

* * *

You sit up and find yourself alone in your ship’s cargo hold. Your ship hasn’t floated far from where it was originally docked, which means that you were only unconscious for a few minutes.

Your head is spinning as you bring your ship back into the docking area. Your cargo is long gone, the authorities have some questions for you, and your ship needs some substantial repairs; you manage to obfuscate your way through the questioning and shell out enough credits to get someone halfway competent to repair your ship. These tasks keep you more or less grounded until you find a place in the spaceport to stay for the night, at which point your head starts spinning again because _what the hell just happened_.

You can’t figure out which is more impossible: the fact that he saved your life or the fact that somehow a ghost managed to touch you.

Luke isn’t around and for one very surreal second you wonder if you should have left some kind of note back on the ship so that he could find you.

You wait for hours but he doesn’t appear. You have so many questions and no one to talk to about them, because he’s the only one who you could talk to about them.

You feel silly, because it isn’t as though he’s always around normally, but something about this feels so much more final than the other times. Was that always the plan? you wonder. To get to know you and get you hooked and then vanish with some kind of dramatic sacrifice?

You lie awake in your filthy excuse for a motel room and try to push away the realization that you’ve been fighting all along: you need him.

* * *

The thirty-eighth time may not count since you don’t actually _see_ him. It’s the middle of your second night at this horrible motel and you hear his voice in your ear.

“I’m here.”

He doesn’t know how it happened either, it turns out, but he spent every second since you closed your eyes on the ship trying to figure out a way to do it again. So far, it seems like not manifesting visibly might help. He says that he’s going to keep trying.

It’s then that you realize that whatever he’s doing is working because it isn’t just that you’re hearing his voice in your ear, you’re also feeling the sensation of his breath on your skin.

You point this out and laugh because how the hell is he even _breathing_?

You talk together until you fall asleep. More than once, you turn to face him before you remember that there’s nothing to see. Instead, you close your eyes and pretend that he’s there, all of him lying so close to you that you could just reach out and touch him.

* * *

Your ship is finally fixed and you managed to do enough jobs dockside to pay for the cargo you lost during the robbery, so you head back out to space.

Your numbering after the thirty-eighth time begins to get jumbled up because it’s no longer as simple as that. His presence is more of a series of moments: a hand on your arm, a head leaning against your shoulder, the exhale of his laughter disturbing strands of your hair.

The process is a strange blur of joy and frustration because feeling him touch you is wonderful but every time he stops it’s worse than before. You eventually say this out loud with a note of embarrassment in your voice, but you hear him laugh and feel him brush his fingers lightly along your cheek as he says that he sympathizes.

You say that you wish there was something you could do to help. He says that you already are.

* * *

It takes another week or two for you to realize that he hasn’t left at all since you left that spaceport. Sure, you don’t always hear or feel him, but you can sense his presence all the same.

You think that it’s because he’s been working harder at staying, but he speculates that it might be because you’re also becoming more open to the Force. That surprises you because you thought you had pretty much shut down completely after the Emperor died. You didn’t think that it was a power you ever really had except by proxy, so you start asking Luke more questions about the Force.

He tells you what he can: what he learned from his teachers and what he figured out on his own. It’s fascinating, but the more he talks about it the sadder you get. It takes a while before that feeling turns into a thought: he would have been a great teacher. And now he’ll never be one, because you killed him.

You’ve been telling yourself all this time that you won’t apologize because it wasn’t your fault, you were just following orders, but the truth is that no matter who ordered it, you were the hand that killed him. You were the one who took away his life and his future and everything that he cared about.

All of that hits you like a freighter and before you even know what you’re doing you’re crying because, for all of your jokes and banter, it never entirely hit you what him being dead actually meant. You’re caught up in a storm of mourning and regret and guilt, and all you can manage to say is that you’re sorry, you’re so sorry for what you did.

Which is when you realize that you’re saying all of this to his _face,_  because you can see him. He’s still transparent but he’s sitting right in front of you and he’s holding your hands in his and he’s _there_.

You look down at your hands and then back up at his eyes and you say that it makes no sense that you should get to have him around you all the time like some kind of reward _._

He doesn’t say anything and you’ve run out of words, so you both sit there with the implications of the word “reward” hanging in the air between you. You keep waiting for him to vanish, to leave you alone, or to just say that he isn’t some prize to be awarded to someone. The uncertainty is agony so you decide to just do it yourself. You begin to pull your hands away, which is when he takes your face in his hands and leans in to kiss you. Your lips meet and, even though you’ve completely lost track of what things are possible and what things aren’t, you feel like a miracle just happened.

You ask him why and he says that not being able to do that was killing him. You can’t help it; you laugh hysterically before he silences your giggles with another kiss.

* * *

Your name is Mara Jade.

You used to be the Emperor’s Hand. You used to be a tool to be wielded by others.

You used to be alone. You used to be someone who didn’t need anyone.

You used to be a lot of things.

Now you’re something new. It’s not what you expected. It’s not something you’re even able to explain. You don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t know where you’re going, but you at least know that you’re not alone. And never will be again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be honest: I have NO IDEA what happens next.
> 
>  
> 
> Music: Charming Disaster, "Ghost Story"


End file.
